SWAT Team Detains Popular Gamer Who Was Live-Streaming ‘Counter-Strike’ | Hacker News Reader

SWAT Team Detains Popular Gamer Who Was Live-Streaming ‘Counter-Strike’

techcrunch.com

61 pointsColinWright53 comments

Given that this could have easily resulted in a death, calling it a "prank" and suggesting that "Whomever instigated the swatting should be ashamed of themselves" seems the wrong of language for what is a pretty serious crime.

Seriously. How about, "Whoever committed this crime should go to prison"?

I also object to the headline. It makes it sound like the police raided and arrested him for playing games.

you are probably right. it's a crime to abuse civil servants but wow what timing. right when the US is in the middle of a militarisation of police debate centered in part around abusive use of SWAT everywhere. In the end though this particular use illustrates that not all police are animals. Of course, Kootra is white. Just sayin.

"could have easily resulted in a death" applies to lots of things.

Getting in your car in the morning can easily result in a death.

From a statistical point of view, this situation probably wasn't as dangerous at it seems.

While I agree wholeheartedly, we should probably discourage pranks that have non-zero (or at least non-negligible) chances of death as a potential outcome.

Exactly. Techcrunch writes about interesting events sometimes, but boy do they have room for improvement when it comes to quality.

This kind of thing is just unnacceptable in a free nation.

We're not peons to be treated like animals. "Get on the fucking ground", "Don't you fucking move" ... these aren't the commands of an officer sworn to protect the citizens, these are the commands of a power-driven, egomaniacal, paramilitary police force who continue to abuse their power and assault private citizens without due cause and without repercussion. A phone call does not warrant that response.

Police are thugs, SWAT is worse. Its a shame we've come to this as a country, and nobody seems to care.

Not to mention that, after he complied with no signs of resistance, he still gets a boot in the back from these thugs. The guy even jumps off his back foot a couple times, just to make sure his entire body weight is on him. Good thing he could hear them over the headphones, or he'd have likely been shot in the back. That's the price you pay for not resisting.

"Hello! SWAT team! May we come in? Good day to you sir. We have reports that you may be manufacturing illegal narcotics and in possession of firearms in violation of your parole. Would you kindly lie down upon the floor so we can ensure that it is safe to enter your abode?"

This kind of attitude is why were seeing a more militarized police. Police is made of of society. Everyone is growing to be uptight over entitled pricks.. so that's all there is to choose from when hiring police.

Chill out. The guy was given bad information about the suspect. Its not his fault it happened. He acted appropriatly for the situation. Hes a person like you and me.

The actual victim in the story isn'tas butt hurt about what happened as you are.

I'm curious how it is a police force could be talked into doing something likes this in the course of a prank. You would hope they would do at minimum a cursory amount of investigation before taking measures like this.

What research should the police force do when someone calls in a bomb threat or a shooter in a school?

Maybe they shouldn't send the SWAT team, but rather, send a car around to see what's up before the team goes bashing through the windows?

Depending on the nature of the original (fake) report, that may not be a realistic option.

Well this doesn't look like it was a school and if it was a bomb threat why would you send a SWAT team into a building that you believe is going to blow up? It doesn't say what information the police were acting on but you would think they would have figured out before putting the guy in handcuffs that they were acting on false information.

Unfortunately they have to take every call seriously and act immediately. There is no way for them to distinguish between a fake and real call. Unless the place where the alleged threat is occurring is a regular target for swatting. In that case police still visit but they don't send a whole swat team.

They have the capability to knock on the door and see if there is a response before they throw people to the ground and point guns in their faces

it's supposed to be difficult to get "no knock" warrants but apparently they're being passed out like candy on halloween now.

Also, busting the door down and yelling "police" counts as "fair warning" :/

Why not just run a tank through the front door and demolish the building while they are at it.

The report they received was a shooter in the building who had shot two people and was holding the rest of the people there hostage.

If you were in charge of the police, what would your response be to such a report?

I'd call back the phone number the call supposedly came from and see who answered. I would Google the business if it was a business and if they had a contact number call that number as well. Go to the alleged scene and ask if anyone in neighboring businesses had herd gun shots.

Even just from the perspective of the safety of the SWAT team it is colossally stupid to send them into a building based on a single source unverified tip like that without doing a cursory investigation of the circumstances first.

It's not "unfortunately", they should take every call very seriously and act immediately. Anybody that calls 911 as a joke needs to be punished swiftly and severely.

I mean unfortunately because there's no solution to this where emergency services can perfectly determine if a call is genuine or not. So it is unfortunate that they have their time wasted, when they could be used elsewhere.

SWATTING. Usually the phone call is spoofed so it seems like the call is coming from the building itself.

Yeah, running your own switch allows you to send whatever you want as caller ID. You get the subject's number, call 911 and claim there's a hostage crisis.

I miss the days when prank calls were about refrigerators running. Things are so mean on the Internet these days. Trolls play for keeps, not for luls.

Sounds to me as if that telco infrastructure could do with a bit more security.

Caller ID is not and never was intended to be secure.

I believe these reports are done using calls with a fake caller identification. A number of ways to do that is just one google search away and is only a tiny bit harder than sending an email with fake "From:" or a real envelope with a fake sender address.

I understand that part. I question why the police's first thought would be to send a SWAT team w/o first verifying the information they received was even a little bit true.

Well, if they receive a call about an active shooter, it's understandable that there isn't much time taken to investigate before going in.

Most of them these days appear to be accomplished by corrupting the call data going to the 911 center and then the caller tells the operator whatever fake address they want.

Spoofing caller id does not often work because 911 centers use a more powerful system for identifying calls that is like ANI.

There was a presentation at DEFCON this year on this very subject.

Haven't seen the talk, but that wasn't my experience after working for a VoIP provider. Being your own operator you publish whatever number you want and customers are in charge of putting their correct address for use by the emergency services. For services where you intend to keep all the right information, this call can be still tracked later on. But there are providers who don't care.

Basically at each hop they would have to rely on that hop playing nicely or you can't get more info.

Imagine you called up to report a genuine crime taking place, and the dispatcher's reaction was 'oh really, that doesn't sound very convincing.' You'd be furious, and rightly so. If the caller's location is spoofed, which is not hard to do, and the caller has minimal acting skills, then the police would be remiss not to act on it.

I really do not care for the prevalence of SWAT teams in the US, but then I don't care for the ease with which criminals can heavily arm themselves either.

And when the police show up to a scene where they see nothing is happening, they can stand down.

I'm willing to bet more people are harmed by SWAT teams than by heavily armed criminals using the same class of gear.

A patrolman would've been more than sufficient for this.

EDIT:

Just to make this painfully obvious...had he turned around quickly with a mouse in his hand, they quite possibly could have drilled him. Is that sort of risk really something we're okay with?

EDIT 2:

For the downvoters--notice that I said "same class of gear". How many criminals are actually busted carrying fully-automatic MP5s, assault rifles, shotguns, and body armor?

I'm not making an argument for SWAT teams, just about the difficulty of evaluating false reports of a serious crime.

A patrolman would've been more than sufficient for this.

That sort of depends on what report was made in the 911 call(s), doesn't it? I mean, we know now it was just one guy playing videogames at home, but you can't just call 911 and ask for them to send a SWAT team somewhere. Presumably the dispatchers were led to believe that something much more dangerous was taking place.

That's the whole thing really. 911 responders have to make decisions with out being able to know the outcome ahead of time.

> A patrolman would've been more than sufficient for this

In this case, according to the report at Ars, the 911 caller claimed to be a worker there who has shot two coworkers already and was holding the rest hostage.

That's a bit much for a patrolman to deal with.

I'm pretty strongly against how heavily armed and often used SWAT teams and general police forces have become (such as against barbershops for licensing checks [1]) but I pretty much agree.

In these cases you have someone trying to convince the cops that something dangerous is really happening, and I'm not sure I can think of a practical method for them to figure out are real and which aren't.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/12/09/us-florida-barbers...

In addition to what others are saying (location spoofing, etc) another factor to consider is this was in Littleton, CO. Specifically, about 5 miles away from Columbine.

That is one of the reasons why can not call the police from a voip service in Germany. (These devices / services have to warn you about that fact before buy.)

Only traceable methods are allowed to call. That way it can be ensured that someone who can call the police safely but only without speaking can be rescued. ... Or "prankers" located.

I'm with the folks who are wondering at the police response. Aren't they trained to assess a situation? There is only one person in the room - which is an office and he's playing on the computer. Is their only training to throw people on the ground and pin them? Aren't they trained to simply ask questions and judge from body language and emotions whether this person is up to something, is armed or acting strange vs just a bystander.

I think this video is very disturbing. It shows we have incompetent police. We need to train them better. It's very easy to take a bunch of hefty fellows and give them guns and show them how to shoot people.

It takes more time to train them to assess situations, and approach people with dignity and respect. I think we should spend this time.

It always bugs me when police turn off cameras in situations like this. How is it not evidence tampering?

Evidence tampering refers to manipulating evidence once it has been collected not while it is being created.

I'm no lawyer, but to me, that's an interpretation that's more to-the-letter than in-the-spirit. A savvy judge could conceivably consider evidence collection mechanism tampering a special case of evidence tampering.

That's 'collected' only in the sense that the evidence has come into existence and legal proceedings have become a possibility. Speaking only for the US and as far as I'm aware, it isn't necessary for the evidence to actually be in the possession of any legal authority or for any legal proceedings to be underway.

Deleting incriminating emails in contemplation of future investigation is tampering with evidence, for example. I won't comment on police video recordings - knowledge and intent play a significant role in whether or not a crime has occurred, here.

The gamer asked them to turn off the streaming as he was going to give them personal info and didn't want it to be broadcast.

I love hearing "THE TERRORISTS WIN" from the game audio during this. Apropos.

Payday would've been funnier.

The victim has an incredible amount of sangfroid. I'm amazed that he wasn't freaking out in an obvious way. His follow-up tweet is a bit understated as well.

He was a white male. These things tend towards non-fatal resolutions when this is the case.

Well not freaking out helps.

There is an audio[1] that appears to be a recording of the perpetrators of this "swatting." Twitter handles[2][3] go along with it.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEPRmpUnTgM

[2]: https://twitter.com/ScrewPain

[3]: https://twitter.com/spiky

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